Thursday, 15 November 2012

Guest post: who can be counted as a casual MMO gamer? (part 2)

Liam Harper concludes his exploration of casual players in MMOs. Check out part one here.While
the majority of the first part of this post seemingly been me defending Blizzard (I’m
quite often a huge critic of theirs, if you follow me on Twitter you
will know that), however there are some things that have really
irritated me.

Cross
Realm Zones - The idea was a noble idea, but in reality it’s killed the
enjoyment of low level zones for me. They feel too crowded, the
competition for mobs too severe. I’ve felt myself bubbling up on quite a
few occasions when I have to wait for a quest mob to spawn because it
has just been killed by someone on another server. I feel like an old
grandad running out of his front door and saying “GET OFF MY LAWN!”

Items
behind gated content that is behind gated content. - Whilst this
doesn’t bother me, I do agree with people’s grievances about it. For
example you have to do dailies with one faction to unlock another
faction, to get access to the gear for that faction. You then need to
make sure that you have the correct reputation AND valor points to get
the item you require. They’ve hidden things behind too many gates and
that needs looking at. I’m not against some gating, but having 3-4
levels to go through before finally get there feels a bit too much.

Rep
grinding too slow - This again is to do with dailies, but one of the
things that put me off the whole daily grind is that you’d sometimes
hand in a quest and get 138 reputation. 138?!? Was there really any
point? There’s an argument going around that tabards should be
reintroduced, and I agree with this. You should have to do dailies until
you reach honored and then have the option to either equip a tabard and
run heroic dungeons or carry doing the dailies. I don’t see a problem
with this.

And finallyI saw a great tweet the other day from Velidra that said: “Dear everyone. If you have already got 9x raid ready characters and are burning out, I'm not going to have much sympathy”This
is so true that I can’t even begin to describe. You’ll be surprised how
many people post and say “I’ve got to level 90 in 3.5 hours, I reach
exalted with everyone since the 15th of last month. I’M BORED”Well to be honest. That is your fault. If you don’t pace yourself then you only have yourself to blame!- Liam HarperFollow Liam on Twitter @Guillin

About me

Hi, I'm Scott and I love nerdy stuff, like tabletop roleplaying games, comic books and board games. I run a very small press roleplaying game publisher called Trollish Delver Games where I produce games like Unbelievably Simple Roleplaying (USR).

Get in touch for a chat, to send a press release or to ask me about doing a review of your product at scott[at]trollishdelver.com